"Magic," he told her again. "There's magic permeating everything here. It keeps the stone strong."

"An entire city," Sarraya said in disbelief. "Who would believe me if I told them?"

"I would," he said calmly. "Then again, I know you're not lying."

Sarraya laughed, and that seemed to snap her out of it. "It is pretty amazing, isn't it?"

"Only to us," he shrugged. "They're probably used to it."

An Aeradalla landed on the edge of the tier not twenty paces from them, next to the building to his left. He ducked back into the alley and looked at this winged person. He was tall and thin, and he had those large white-feathered wings on his back. His hair was a long blond braid hanging down his back, his skin bronzed from the sun, and he was quite attractive by human norms. He wore little more than a cross harness and trousers with a wide leather belt, upon which hung a small crossbow and a slender sword, and soft half-boots of leather. A crossbow was a clever weapon for a winged warrior, since it didn't need to be held in a drawn position, and they were relatively easy to aim. For a highly mobile warrior, it was a sensible weapon, for landing to engage with a sword was taking away from one of the Aeradalla's fundamental advantages. It was smarter for them to shoot crossbows at their enemies at a distance from which the opponent could not retaliate. That crossbow looked small enough to be recocked without a windlass. Tarrin would bet that learning to reload that thing while on the wing took a great deal of practice.

The Aeradalla didn't seem to notice him, instead moving up to the building before him. He knocked on a door that Tarrin didn't see before-mainly because the city itself had swallowed up his attention-and was soon allowed inside. When the door closed, Tarrin padded back out towards the edge of the tier, looking at the building. He saw the door now, which was a set of double-doors that, when taken together, were significantly taller and wider than normal doors. To give room for the wings, he realized.

He stopped at the edge of the tier and looked down. It was about forty spans to the next tier, but some of the roofs of the houses and buildings below were close to the level of the floor of the tier he was currently occupying. The effect wasn't one of blocky descent as one looked out over the city, but rather one of gradual sloping towards the edges of the magical city. There were a few holes in that sloping regularity, but they were too far away for his cat's eyes to see much. Tarrin's vision wasn't very sharp in cat form, more geared for seeing motion than making out details. Seeing at distance required vision able to pick out details. He could see to the end of the city, but that far away was little more than a blur of different colors against the continual sky. Those empty areas were dark splotches against the tan backdrop of the city.

"What are those empty places?" Tarrin asked Sarraya.

"Looks like marketplaces," Sarraya replied. "I see alot of Aeradalla in them. I can only guess they're buying things." There was a pause. "I wonder how they keep from running into each other in the air," she mused. "There are alot of them, and only so much airspace overhead."

"Who knows?" he asked, turning around. The magical object was up, and from the sense of it, it was in the Conduit at the heart of the spire. That would place it more or less in the exact center of the city itself. "We have to go that way," he told her, looking back towards the wall of the next tier up, which was about half a longspan away. As far as he could judge. "We'll have to move at night. I'll have to change to get up the tier walls, and I can't do that in the daytime without getting spotted."

"Good plan," Sarraya agreed. "Let's go find some dark, quiet place that can't be seen from above, and we'll rest."

"Why so it can't be seen?"

"Aeradalla are probably related to hunting birds, Tarrin, and if you didn't know, raptors have eyesight that rivals Allia's. They can see a mouse in high grass from a longspan away."

"You have a point," he acceded. "Alright, but I'm not going to spend the rest of the day hiding in that tunnel. We'll just have to find some other place."

"I think we can find something," she assured him. "If worse comes to worst, I'll just conjure up something to hide us until nightfall."

"Good enough," he said calmly as he padded back into the alley.

To: Title EoF

The night was a different time of day, to be certain, but it was also an entirely different state of mind. It was a time of mystery, a time for things to occur that had no place under the light of the sun, a dark time for dark creatures, carrying out dark deeds.

But just as many things were, the dark was often misunderstood by those who were not governed by it. Tarrin stood on the edge of the selfsame ledge he had occupied during the daytime, standing between those same two buildings with a surprisingly warm, gentle wind pulling at his braid and tail. He was wearing his body for the dark, his natural form, standing on that ledge and looking out on the city with eyes much better suited for taking in the landscape. To any Aeradalla that may happen to see him, he looked a mysterious, ominous figure, a creature out of bedtime stories-or nightmares, as the case may be-a decidedly unnatural being that was clearly invading the home territory of that avian race. But such conclusions were incorrect, for the Were-cat had not come as a baby-stealer or an inciter of chaos, but merely as a curious tourist of sorts, who was there for one reason and one reason only.

Now that he could see the city, he better understood how it probably operated. What he had seen as empty holes in the regularity of the landscape were indeed open patches on the tiers, but what he hadn't seen before was that they weren't the last tiers in the vast rings. There were many more past them, and they all glowed greenish in the soft light of the Skybands and the full White Moon, Domammon. They were farm fields, and they occupied the outside rings of the city's land. The Aeradalla weren't just hunters and gatherers, they had found a way to farm up on this skyborne city. The effort required to haul dirt suitable for farming up to this city was quite staggering to consider, and it increased his respect for the winged race by many degrees. Especially when considering that the open land devoted to farming took up over a third, but not quite nearly half of the available land that existed up on the city's platform. On a platform that ran about ten longspans from center to outside edge, three or four longspans of that radius was given over to farmland.

Since they did farm, that meant that water had to be plentiful here. He hadn't seen any indications of it yet, but he had a ways to go, and he was pretty sure he'd find the answer to that question on his way up.

The buildings immediately inside the ring bordering the farms was filled with large buildings of open construction. Odds were that they were buildings supporting the farming efforts, holding harvests, tools, and other implements required to farm the land brought up here. Instead of building their barns and sheds on the precious land, they had moved them up to the next tier, so every available inch of farming land was made available. That was a very smart move, he recognized.

The buildings inside the barn tier were somewhat large, and those few tiers were where the openings in the skyline were located. Those had to be shops and taverns; a merchant district of sorts. The buildings above those tiers were occupied by a slew of smallish buildings that had to be homes, and he saw as he looked that the further up one looked, the larger and more ornate the houses became. Altitude was a measure of wealth and influence in this strange city, he reasoned. The higher one lived, the higher one's station. He had come out on a tier that had relatively nice homes-something of a middle class of sorts-and he realized that he was just inside that tenuous border. Smaller, cruder houses were on the tier just below the one on which he stood. At the edge of each tier, located symmetrically, were block-and-tackle platforms built off the tier's edge. Loading platforms, he realized, to move items too heavy to carry in flight from one tier to the next.